The Art of Logo. Part I: Your Media. Finishes

Finishes

ere,
"finish" is an umbrella term for all that you do with your logo
after you've finally decided that both the visual and the text are
ready, sit in their proper places and have their proper colors.
Finishes include various decorations such as surface textures, drop
shadows, highlights, gradients, transparency, etc. This category is,
all in all, a sign of modern computerized technologies---you
couldn't see a drop shadow or a marble texture in a
pre-desktop-publishing publication or, God forbid, a logo.

People generally believe that cool finishes is what makes their
graphics professional. Far from that. Finishes may give, as
the word implies, a finished appearance, but no amount of drop
shadows will improve a logo which is designed poorly with regard to
its shape or color. Strictly speaking, finishes do not represent a
separate media, so in applying them you can refer to all the
principles I've tried to outline above. Feel free: Once you've
made a cool thing and you know what makes it so cool, you're
unlikely to spoil it with wrong finishes. (Although this happens
time and again.)

Speaking of tools, the stage of applying finishes is where you
quit your vector drawing package and export your creation into
Photoshop or other painting program. (To be fair, Corel Xara is one
vector package that's capable of making transparency and some sort
of drop shadows, thus almost eliminating the need to edit the
exported bitmap.) For a designer, finishes are primarily a
technical issue; it's a matter of learning and applying certain
tricks---of the sort that is taught a lot on web design related
sites and in magazines.

So what do we have in our logo to fiddle with? First of all
(although this is more relevant to the Forms section), note how the dot above the "i"
comes close to the point where the squares' corners converge---but
does not coincide with it. One general form-related principle
(looks like I've not covered it so far) is that lines and points
that come close enough tend to "snap" at each other in the urge to
reduce the overall number of elements in the picture. So let's
move the text a bit so that the dot above "i" covers exactly the
point of convergence. (The letter "i" is really a favorite for
logomakers, by the way.)

Fig. 12
Adding a stud

This looks great and helps to integrate text and graphic into one
tight bunch. But now that this "i-dot" has become the center of the
composition it definitely wants more prominence and visibility.
First I tried to stress this location with a solid-colored circle
bigger in size than the original i-dot. But no matter what color I tried for this
disk, it just wouldn't stand out as I wanted it to. Surely some
kind of a finish appeared to be obligatory here. So I painted the disk
black and applied an eccentric radial gradient from white to black,
turning the disk into a sphere (Fig. 12). That's it!

Basically our logo is ready. Other finishes that can be applied
are something of the "add sugar and milk according to taste"
kind. To better balance the graphic on the top, I added a drop
shadow to the text with an intention to make it appear
heavier. It turned out, however, that the drop shadow looks
best when its top half is gradually erased (Fig. 13) in order
to prevent encumbering the area where text and graphic are
neighboring. This example gives me an opportunity to mention
two more issues pertaining to drop shadows---which are certainly one
of the most used types of finishes. First, you should mind the
direction of the imaginary "light beam" that produces the shadow and
check if it clashes with what your shape and its colors imply (for
example, in our case the northwestern light would not be acceptable
since the visual suggests light casted from northeast). Second, the
color of the drop shadow doesn't necessarily have to be pure gray;
you may use any tint to better match colors in the rest of the logo.

Fig. 13
Time to quit playing and call your boss

The last word on finishes is that many of them look cool when you
zoom into your logo full-screen, but turn into mud and scratches
when the logo is reduced to the real-world size. For
instance, if you were planning to use our sample logo in small
sizes, you'd better remove the drop shadow and increase the size of
the sphere a bit. Also, as is the case with letters, scaling a
logo up or down may require changing its proportions (the
height/width ratio) just a bit for better perception of the form.